The truth about UVI

[GoodKarma19]

The body stops producing D3 from UVB when it has enough. This is why we want to use UVB instead of dietary D3. So giving higher levels of UVB will not give an overdose of D3. Only giving too much dietary D3 will do that. The danger of ultra high UVB comes from damage to the cells and organs.

Apologies, I'm between classes and I'm probably not making my thoughts as clear as they could be.

I was referring to high UVB lighting in conjunction with dietary D3 supplementation. I accidentally blasted my panther girl with a 5.0 UVB at about 5" from her head while on a daily regimen of Repashy calcium plus LoD (which has since been changed), and she became very ill. She sustained some damage to both of her eyes (swelling, crusty, misshapen), became extremely lethargic, etc etc - UVB overexposure and (likely) hypervitaminosis the best we can tell. It took me a lot longer than it should have to clue in, but within days of raising her UVB she showed marked improvement.[/QUOTE]

 

[cyberlocc]

We use UVB because it engages the body's internal stop measures to maintain a certain level. If it has vitamin D3 from diet it will not make it from UVB. If we provide all the D3 needs from diet then the body will not make D3 from UVB. The danger of overdose is if we give more than the body can take through diet.

gular edema can be produced by Vitamin A which is now on the increase of use as well. We don't even know all the causes of edema. So you are making quite a leap of logic attaching edema to higher UVB.

The biggest challenge in convincing the Facebook mob that T5s are, on one hand a great tool, but that they have to be used carefully because of the strength near the bulb, is that there are no direct connections of health problems with too high of UVB beyond the study Dr. Ferguson did showing a decrease in fecundity in female panthers. Beyond that we can't put our finger on any particular effect of too high of UVB other than Veiled Chameleons turning their insides black to protect their organs from UVB. I'd love it if anyone could produce a connection between too high of UVB and a health risk because I am 100% confident it is there, but you can't just take one case off Facebook and say it is excess UVB. You get edema and hypervitaminosis D3 from excessive supplementation - not UVB. Unless you can show any evidence that the body cannot measure the levels of D3 from diet. If so then I'd love to see that. Experimentally, we have panthers that are getting close to what we can figure is complete D3 from diet showing no problems when their UVB is changed from T8 to T5. It is hardly a conclusive scientific study, but is a clue that it isn't the UVB.

I firmly believe that we should not be giving excessive UVB, but we also have to be accurate when considering the cause of issues.

This case may be too much Vitamin D3, but that would be a supplementation issue, not UVB. Unless you have some other insight?
Bill

Well as I said, my thoughts on the edema are stemmed from the fact we keep seeing it happen. I have not seen a study on it, it is just a recurring thing that keeps popping up.

I fully agree and understand, we can not judge by just one case. However we are not working with just one case, we have been seeing this happen alot. Animals popping up with Edema, and the only correlation between them, has been they are using strong UVB bulbs, and supplementing with D3 as well. Now I am in full agree it may be both, or rather the combo. I think nightanole touched on this in this thread or the other one, he uses the sticky farms. However what we keep seeing is LoD being used with 10.0/12%s and those animals develop enedma, I think it was jean, who was messing with that a long while back, and I need to find the article. However she said she could basically turn it on and off, by turning off the light or stopping the LoD.
The edema would go away, and she could bring it back, by using both again.

I am fully with the camp to move away from using D3 supplements altogether, dont need to sell me on that one . However, I dont think blasting our animals with unhealthy and most likely unnatural amounts of UVI are the answer, I seen your post saying your using 3.0, thats fine, but this guy is using 6-7 easy, that is encroaching on danger levels for sure. When being used for 12 hours a day, with no escape from the animal at least.

Also as you said, it could be less the D3, and more the organ damage from the UVI, as gular Edema is a sign of organ dysfunction right? So maybe not from too much D3 in this case, but maybe too much UVI. The lights vary, screens vary, and we dont know what actual UVI the animal is getting, however Dr. Ferguson did state that 7.0 is big red DANGER DANGER do not use lol.

Apologies, I'm between classes and I'm probably not making my thoughts as clear as they could be.

I was referring to high UVB lighting in conjunction with dietary D3 supplementation. I accidentally blasted my panther girl with a 5.0 UVB at about 5" from her head while on a daily regimen of Repashy calcium plus LoD (which has since been changed), and she became very ill. She sustained some damage to both of her eyes (swelling, crusty, misshapen), became extremely lethargic, etc etc - UVB overexposure and (likely) hypervitaminosis the best we can tell. It took me a lot longer than it should have to clue in, but within days of raising her UVB she showed marked improvement.

I wouldn't be too concerned with a 5.0 being too much UVI, even at 5 inches. Thats still under 3.0 I believe, or close to it. I think the issue is the LoD, and the stronger UVB.

I use LoD, and have for a long time. However I only dust crickets, or roaches, and I never dust them all, at most I dust half and haven't had any issues. I think LoD is stronger than they want you to think it is.

 

[DeremensisBlue]

Apologies, I'm between classes and I'm probably not making my thoughts as clear as they could be.

I was referring to high UVB lighting in conjunction with dietary D3 supplementation. I accidentally blasted my panther girl with a 5.0 UVB at about 5" from her head while on a daily regimen of Repashy calcium plus LoD (which has since been changed), and she became very ill. She sustained some damage to both of her eyes (swelling, crusty, misshapen), became extremely lethargic, etc etc - UVB overexposure and (likely) hypervitaminosis the best we can tell. It took me a lot longer than it should have to clue in, but within days of raising her UVB she showed marked improvement.

[/QUOTE]
I don't doubt this at all! Being blasted with UVB cannot be good for them and you did exactly what should be done! My point was that that effect of UVB on this situation would not have been to create move D3 than she could handle. That would have to come from dietary D3. UVB would have been responsible for some of the other damage being done.

 

[GoodKarma19]

I wouldn't be too concerned with a 5.0 being too much UVI, even at 5 inches. Thats still under 3.0 I believe, or close to it. I think the issue is the LoD, and the stronger UVB.

Actually, according to recent charts it would have put her at close to 6-7 UVI! If I'm reading this correctly. I have a single reflector.

 

[cyberlocc]

Actually, according to recent charts it would have put her at close to 6-7 UVI! If I'm reading this correctly. I have a single reflector.

View attachment 257373

Ya thats ugh pretty high. He has a single reflector, and Ferguson was saying that 7 for 12 hours a day inescapable will prove lethal to any reptile. He said from the bulb to the basking branch (not the animal, the branch) was 6 inches. So that thing is being blasted with some serious UVI. I dont know how tall the animal is thats why I just guessed from the photo, about 4.5 inches to the mid section, tip of the back, is likely in a higher UVI.

Not shrubbery in any of the mid section of the cage either, as you can see, its like that all the way down. Fake leaves around the back and side walls thats it.

 

[DeremensisBlue]

Here is the bottom line - we in the community will get no where by experimenting with combining UVB and dietary D3.

Our way out of this unknown is to raise chameleons with dietary D3 and have females produce fully calcified eggs. We have that for UVI 3 for panthers and veileds. I am now experimenting with both panthers and veileds at lower UVI levels and perhaps by the end of the year we will have one data point at the lower levels. And once we have this data point, and others reproduce it, we can lower the proven minimum effective UVI. UVI 3 was an educated guess chosen by Pete Hawkins in his experiment with a veiled chameleon. There is nothing magic about it other than he thought it made sense. And then he turned it into a data point which was reproduced by other and for panthers as well. So that is why we are using it as a starting point.

As far as the maximum safe UVI, I can only hope that proving effectiveness at the lower levels will temper this blanket "use a T5" advice which gives no consideration for the fact that a T5 5.0 in a multi-bulb fixture gives a wildly different UVB exposure than a 14% in a single bulb reflector. It is truly scary to see this advice being thrown about as gospel truth. Using these ultra high levels is relatively new and we know that in humans there are long term effects from UVB exposure that don't show up for a while so we may be in for a lot of mysterious illnesses. I don't know and I can't prove it. I can only hope that proving that they don't need such high UVB and simply educating the community on what levels of UVB actually do come out of these bulbs in the first couple inches will concern people enough that they will play it safe and raise these fixture up above the cage to limit what levels actually get into the cage.

Bill

 

[GoodKarma19]

Here is the bottom line - we in the community will get no where by experimenting with combining UVB and dietary D3.

Our way out of this unknown is to raise chameleons with dietary D3 and have females produce fully calcified eggs. We have that for UVI 3 for panthers and veileds. I am now experimenting with both panthers and veileds at lower UVI levels and perhaps by the end of the year we will have one data point at the lower levels. And once we have this data point, and others reproduce it, we can lower the proven minimum effective UVI. UVI 3 was an educated guess chosen by Pete Hawkins in his experiment with a veiled chameleon. There is nothing magic about it other than he thought it made sense. And then he turned it into a data point which was reproduced by other and for panthers as well. So that is why we are using it as a starting point.

As far as the maximum safe UVI, I can only hope that proving effectiveness at the lower levels will temper this blanket "use a T5" advice which gives no consideration for the fact that a T5 5.0 in a multi-bulb fixture gives a wildly different UVB exposure than a 14% in a single bulb reflector. It is truly scary to see this advice being thrown about as gospel truth. Using these ultra high levels is relatively new and we know that in humans there are long term effects from UVB exposure that don't show up for a while so we may be in for a lot of mysterious illnesses. I don't know and I can't prove it. I can only hope that proving that they don't need such high UVB and simply educating the community on what levels of UVB actually do come out of these bulbs in the first couple inches will concern people enough that they will play it safe and raise these fixture up above the cage to limit what levels actually get into the cage.

Bill

I appreciate all that you do, Bill, and eagerly follow your research!

I blindly took advice without looking into it properly, and it very nearly killed one of my girls. I'll no longer be offering dietary D3 beyond maybe twice a month dustings with LoD to cover my bases until I get my hands on a SolarMeter. It took an incredibly long time to figure out what was happening - on paper, my husbandry looked totally fine! Both myself and my vet were at our wits end.

 

[DeremensisBlue]

By the way, as far as how much D3 a panther chameleon can take, if we take the story that Dr. Ferguson related about his collegue Larry Talent who experimented with raising panthers on D3 and no UVB he found that you could do that with 25-30 IU of D3 per week. I took the percentage of D3 in Repashy Calcium Plus an then weighed it out and figure out how much powder it is. That amount of powder coated about 20-30 adult crickets. That is very close to a standard weekly feeding for panther chameleons.

This is a very gross, high level calculation because there is a wide variation in how much powder stays on a cricket and how much actually gets into the chameleon due to falling off. But it is a very good insight into why Kammerflage Kreations can feed Repashy Calcium Plus with every feeding and they do not have any overdose issues. They are giving right around the amount specified to be the needs of panther chameleons. And that would be why when they switched from T8s to T5s they saw no difference. Their chameleons were simply needing a "top-off" and they just needed a little bit of UVB to do that.

What does this mean for us? It gives us a data point as to what safe levels of supplementation are. The Kammers didn't calculate this out by Larry Talent's experiment, but the levels are strangely equivalent. So, when does it become an overdose? Well, still working on that one...

 

[DeremensisBlue]

I appreciate all that you do, Bill, and eagerly follow your research!

I blindly took advice without looking into it properly, and it very nearly killed one of my girls. I'll no longer be offering dietary D3 beyond maybe twice a month dustings with LoD to cover my bases until I get my hands on a SolarMeter. It took an incredibly long time to figure out what was happening - on paper, my husbandry looked totally fine! Both myself and my vet were at our wits end.

I am very glad you figured it out! Especially since excessive UVB is a relatively new concept in our community! I fear that there will be few people considering this as a potential issue. But with more awareness we can bring it into the real of consideration.

 

[GoodKarma19]

I am very glad you figured it out! Especially since excessive UVB is a relatively new concept in our community! I fear that there will be few people considering this as a potential issue. But with more awareness we can bring it into the real of consideration.

Absolutely! We're in a transition phase in the hobby, and there will be some speed bumps ahead.

 

[cyberlocc]

Here is the bottom line - we in the community will get no where by experimenting with combining UVB and dietary D3.

Our way out of this unknown is to raise chameleons with dietary D3 and have females produce fully calcified eggs. We have that for UVI 3 for panthers and veileds. I am now experimenting with both panthers and veileds at lower UVI levels and perhaps by the end of the year we will have one data point at the lower levels. And once we have this data point, and others reproduce it, we can lower the proven minimum effective UVI. UVI 3 was an educated guess chosen by Pete Hawkins in his experiment with a veiled chameleon. There is nothing magic about it other than he thought it made sense. And then he turned it into a data point which was reproduced by other and for panthers as well. So that is why we are using it as a starting point.

As far as the maximum safe UVI, I can only hope that proving effectiveness at the lower levels will temper this blanket "use a T5" advice which gives no consideration for the fact that a T5 5.0 in a multi-bulb fixture gives a wildly different UVB exposure than a 14% in a single bulb reflector. It is truly scary to see this advice being thrown about as gospel truth. Using these ultra high levels is relatively new and we know that in humans there are long term effects from UVB exposure that don't show up for a while so we may be in for a lot of mysterious illnesses. I don't know and I can't prove it. I can only hope that proving that they don't need such high UVB and simply educating the community on what levels of UVB actually do come out of these bulbs in the first couple inches will concern people enough that they will play it safe and raise these fixture up above the cage to limit what levels actually get into the cage.

Bill

Agreed sounds like the best possible course of action.

I know that Ferguson's study did say UVI 3.0 as a stopping point for Chameleons, I am not sure if that played factor in Petes decision.

I am very curious about the effects of changing UV throughout the Day, and what a stopping point should be if that was done. We know they can experience up to 14-15 in the wild, however I would venture a guess, they hide from that kind of UVI. Ferguson said that 7.0 could be fatal, however I think he means more so of a 12 hour of 7.0, rather than an escape able spike of 10.

I am really curious about the stop of producing D3 from lighting as well. How fast is that ability to turn on and off, and what triggers it? As our UVB lights work from sheer luck, from what I gather. Our current bulbs produce 280 to 320, with 290-300 producing D3, and 300-320 actually destroying it.

So in a situation as of this one, when we are sitting on 6-7 UVI, could it actually have the opposite effect and destroy more than it creates, on top of adding other UV related issues to the mix?

As we look at the spectrum that becomes a serious thing to look at.

As you can see, very very very little of the D3 Creating UV, is present in the bulbs, with a LOT of D3 destroying. So I am curious how the animals body juggles this destruction vs building. Especially when the intensity rises.

 

[DeremensisBlue]

Agreed sounds like the best possible course of action.

I know that Ferguson's study did say UVI 3.0 as a stopping point for Chameleons, I am not sure if that played factor in Petes decision.

I am very curious about the effects of changing UV throughout the Day, and what a stopping point should be if that was done. We know they can experience up to 14-15 in the wild, however I would venture a guess, they hide from that kind of UVI. Ferguson said that 7.0 could be fatal, however I think he means more so of a 12 hour of 7.0, rather than an escape able spike of 10.

I am really curious about the stop of producing D3 from lighting as well. How fast is that ability to turn on and off, and what triggers it? As our UVB lights work from sheer luck, from what I gather. Our current bulbs produce 280 to 320, with 290-300 producing D3, and 300-320 actually destroying it.

So in a situation as of this one, when we are sitting on 6-7 UVI, could it actually have the opposite effect and destroy more than it creates, on top of adding other UV related issues to the mix?

As we look at the spectrum that becomes a serious thing to look at.

As you can see, very very very little of the D3 Creating UV, is present in the bulbs, with a LOT of D3 destroying. So I am curious how the animals body juggles this destruction vs building. Especially when the intensity rises.

Excellent questions. I am hoping John Courteney-Smith is on top of this one. Well, I am preparing an other UVB episode for the podcast. These would be very good questions for me to ask him what insight he has...

 

[nightanole]

RepCal D3+ 400,000 IU/kg
Flukers Reptacalcium 100,000 IU/lb
Exoterra 14,740 IU/lb
ZooMed ReptiCalcium 22,907 IU/kg
Mineral -indoor 2000ui per kg
Repashy calcium plus LoD 8,000 IU/lb

I dont have the time right now to convert kg to lbs, but just pretend that the 8,000 IU/lb is 20,000 ui/kg


So sticky indoor is has 10x less D3 than even LoD.

 

[BrittBepler]

A few questions as I dial in my lights... I have a solarmeter 6.5r and I use a SolarGlo PT2334 - 80 watt 2-in-1 bulb. My solarmeter 6.5r reads around UVI 1.3-1.7 at his basking branch depending where I move the meter under the blulb's reach where it shines on the branch, and the temperature hovers around 84-85 degrees at the basking branch, which both look to be ideal ranges for the needs of a panther as it relates to heat and light.

1. How do I know if my lighting has the proper µW/cm² range mentioned in the other posts (30-35 µW/cm² ) for my male panther chameleon?
2. Vitamin D3 production happens in the 280-320 range, how can I tell my readings above are in this range? Is there a calculation I need to do based on the UVI reading from the solarmeter 6.5r?